12 June 2009

This week has seen a couple of new versions of BOINC. The current version 6.6.36, released yesterday, has been made the release version. In my opinion its premature seeing as we haven't had a chance to test it yet.

I bought another 4 port KVM switch and a couple of cables on eBay. This should allow me to rearrange things a bit so I can put all the machines (except Maul) on shelves and run them all at once. I also need to buy another set of shelves.

I got a quote for 4 i7 machines to replace the 5 quaddies. Without any graphics cards the shop wanted $2,000 each. I think an i7 is about a 50% improvement over a quaddie. Using 150% of the price of a quaddie that means they should cost $1,800 each, so I suggested that if the shop wants the sale they need to get to this figure.

I have one CPDN work unit to upload and report, then I can detach from the project. Unfortunately their upload server ran out of disk space and has been off-line for over a week. I am unable to upload it.

One of the guys on GPUgrid had an interesting i7 machine. It was an asrock machine with 4 x GTX295 cards, giving a total of 8 CPU's and 8 GPU's. He said that it had 4 x 700 watt power supplies to drive it.